What really goes on behind the scenes at the biggest Word of the Year vote in linguistdom? Are we really going to stick with sanewashing for our word? And which words did we miss? We lock in and crash out with New Words Data Czar Dr Kelly Wright.
Timestamps
Open: 0:00
Intros: 0:57
Words: 6:54
Related or Not: 59:22
Comments: 1:19:19
The Reads: 1:24:00
Outtakes: 1:32:39
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Become a Patron!Show notes
2024 Word of the Year Is “Rawdog”
https://americandialect.org/2024-word-of-the-year-is-rawdog/
[PDF] American Dialect Society Selects rawdog as 2024 Word of the Year (entire list)
https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2024-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf
Nominations for the American Dialect Society words of the year can be submitted all year long to
woty@americandialect.org
Ariana Grande Explains the Viral ‘Holding Space’ Moment With Cynthia Erivo
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a63123431/ariana-grande-explains-holding-space-meme-cynthia-erivo/
‘Wicked’—Ariana Grande And Cynthia Erivo’s ‘Holding Space’ Meme, Explained
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/11/26/wicked-ariana-grande-and-cynthia-erivos-holding-space-meme-explained/
Der Great Gatsby (Translated): A Progressive Translation — English to German
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200769388
[PDF] George Lakoff: Classifiers as a Reflection of Mind
https://escholarship.org/content/qt65t327t6/qt65t327t6_noSplash_5df05b53a0ecb152486c43d6a7d704d4.pdf?t=obhwfc
American Dialect Society once again chooses chaos, names “rawdog” 2024 Word Of The Year
The linguistic chaos gremlins have chosen to rawdog the English language itself with their choice of 2024 Word Of The Year
https://www.avclub.com/american-dialect-society-word-of-the-year-rawdog
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
BEN: Hedvig, I don’t know if you experienced this, I’ve definitely experienced this. When you run across someone who’s has encountered the podcast in any capacity, and they’re like, “Isn’t Daniel great?” And it’s like, “I’m right here. I’m right in front of you. You can say something nice about me too.”
DANIEL: Okay, you guys talk about how when you meet people for the show, like, they say, “Oh, Daniel’s so great.” But the thing is, when I meet people who know about the show… they say the same thing….
[PAUSE]
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s not helpful! That doesn’t make me feel better about myself.
HEDVIG: Switcheroo. Rude.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, it’s Ben Ainslie. Ben, hello.
BEN: Hi. It’s so great to be back. I’m really enjoying hearing your voice noise in my ear holes. It’s great. It’s been a while.
DANIEL: Now, I’d like you to choose the word that speaks to you. Here they are. There’s three.
BEN: Okay. Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: GIRLYPOP, YAPPING, or LOCKED IN?
BEN: [IMMEDIATELY] I choose LOCKED IN.
DANIEL: Why do you choose LOCKED IN?
BEN: Over the summer break, summer for us in the Southern hemisphere, I took up two hobbies. I took up woodworking, and I took up sewing. And both of said hobbies have resulted in me having periods of time where I’ve been really, really locked in in a way that I find really pleasurable because you can’t think about very much when you’re really focusing on getting a seam really straight, or you’re really trying hard to get a corner rounded off on a piece of wood and all that sort of stuff. And I’ve really enjoyed physically and tactilely being locked into those pursuits and not being all in my head the whole time. So, yeah, LOCKED IN for me straightaway. That was like the easiest question you’ve ever asked me. I love it.
DANIEL: Great. Okay, fantastic. Next, Dr Hedvig Skirgård. Hi, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hello. Hi. I thought Ben was going to pick YAPPING, but apparently not.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: But I understand. I also like those kind of hobbies.
DANIEL: Well, I’m giving you three other ones. Here they are. BED ROTTING, COOKED, and UNSERIOUS. Actually, that was too easy.
HEDVIG: No, no, no, no. That is not too easy.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: I am a partial fan of BED ROTTING, because…
DANIEL: I know you are.
HEDVIG: …I like to have my tea in the morning, have my cat cuddling with her butt in my armpit and scrolling through TikTok. But sometimes when I do that, it doesn’t feel good. Sometimes, it feels good. COOKED is… I do like conspiracy theories.
DANIEL: No, wait, but I don’t think we’re talking about the same COOKED here. I think this might be a bit different. I think.
HEDVIG: As in, like, “We’re cooked,” as in “We’re fucked”?
DANIEL: I do not think so. Not according to… Is it? Wait.
HEDVIG: Kelly is nodding.
DANIEL: Kelly is nodding.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS] That’s so fun, Daniel, Kelly says I’m right, so no, no, no.
DANIEL: I utterly defer to Kelly. But I think we’re dealing with two slightly different meanings of COOKED. Maybe we’ll get to that, but now I guess it’s time to get to our very special guest, Dr Kelly Wright, of the University of Madison, Wisconsin.
KELLY: Hi.
DANIEL: Hi. Great to have you back.
KELLY: Great to see you all.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
KELLY: I said Happy New Year. Happy New Year.
DANIEL: Happy new everything. Well, maybe not happy new everything, but certainly Happy New Year. Your turn. BRAT, LIBBING OUT or CRASHING OUT?
KELLY: CRASHING OUT. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Interesting. Any particular reason? Any way in which you’re crashing out?
KELLY: Sometimes, you just got to. I feel like I’ve learned to like in resisting the crash out, I did not plan for, I have learned to plan the crash out, and just flop into bed.
DANIEL: That is amazing. I love it. Well, thank you all for being here. What’s coming up on today’s show? The American Dialect Society has had its Annual Word of the Year vote. It’s the only word of the year vote that matters. We’ve always covered it. We love it. Kelly was right there as the New Words Czar.
BEN: Oh.
HEDVIG: Is that the title they give?
KELLY: Yeah, I got to pick my own title. They tried to rename me. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: That’s great. That is so fantastic.
KELLY: They tried to rename me the Nominatrix, which… I prefer Czar.
DANIEL: Look, you’re just giving me strange feelings.
HEDVIG: In our local group chat for after work beers, we have a position called Beer Czar, which is the person who decides where we go for beer, because it’s too much if everyone has an opinion. People can submit proposals, but one person has to decide. Otherwise, chaos reigns.
BEN: Now, does the role shift? Or is it a true czardom where it gets handed down to that person’s child?
HEDVIG: It’s usually Russell Barlow, but whenever he’s out of the country, he deputises someone. He deputised me when he was away, and then now he’s back, and now it’s…
BEN: So, you were the Beer Czarina.
HEDVIG: Yes.
BEN: That’s cool.
DANIEL: All right, well, we’re going to talk through all of these words. Now, it seems that patrons have been getting their lovely mail outs. I’ve got to say that the Grammar Hills magnet has been especially well received. And by the way, that one’s on our shop. Just go to becauselanguage.com and click on shop. Kelly, we sent you a packet as well.
BEN: You probably didn’t even want it, but you’re getting one anyway.
KELLY: Oh, it was such a surprise. I was thrilled. I actually got it the day I came back from our big conference. And it was like a wonderful welcome home.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] The Czar returning triumphantly to their home abode, just being like, “Yes! The prizes and plauditudes that I am due!”
DANIEL: Tributes. [LAUGHS] Well, we get a lot of new patrons every month, but every month we lose some, and that’s because people just get other interests or people’s financial situation changes. So, we appreciate the support from all the patrons that we can get. But I just want to tell you, it’s worth it to join up, even just as a free member. We’ve got a lot planned for this year. Lots of episodes, lots of bonus episodes, including some deep dives and mailbags. A live episode in April for LingFest25, that’s coming up, and all the Discord you can handle. So, jump on in patreon.com/becauselangpod. [WAITING FOR SEGUE] Well…
BEN: Yeah, I was about to say, I would normally segue into the news at this point, but there ain’t no news or at least the only news is the news of the words news, so let’s just do that.
DANIEL: So, Kelly, I was wondering about your role in this as the New Words Czar. What was that process like for you, gathering together everything?
KELLY: Yeah, it’s fun. So, we have a nomination survey that is up for a good chunk of the year. This year, it’s already up for 2025. So, it will be available for the entire calendar year, which is exciting. It only took me four years to do that, [LAUGHTER] but we have this survey where we crowdsource nominations. They literally come from all over the world, which is really exciting. And then, we use that information to help generate a list of potential candidates for the beginning of our live nominating session, which happens in the first week of January every year.
And that session is where the ballot that you can see online really takes shape. So, people come up and they make arguments for certain words or groups of words that we should be interested in. So, for example, when I looked at the data, we usually have a wildcard category. It was covid-related terms a few years ago and then it was AI-related terms last year or in 2023. But when I started looking at the groups, there wasn’t anything like that really popped out, like, that made sense, like, “Oh, this is our category.” So, I went into the nominating session with like, Bleakest Word of the Year. [LAUGHTER] Like, a lot of the words were just no fun. But instead of bleakest, we went with Most Fun While It Lasted to nominate something like flash in the pan.
BEN: Oh, that’s a fun one. Like, flashes in the pan kind of thing.
KELLY: Yeah, it was great. And that came from the floor. So, it’s organic, which is great.
DANIEL: Wow.
KELLY: And then, we also had… this year, a documentary team was with us. Some folks from Stanford made a documentary about the Word of the Year process. So, they were embedded with us for two days.
DANIEL: That is wild. I didn’t know that. When’s that coming out?
KELLY: Yeah, sometime later this year, hopefully.
DANIEL: Cool. Now, I want to ask a question because I’m in the business of noticing the words. I try to bring words that seem relevant to the show. Every couple of weeks, I’ve got to come up with a new bunch of them. And so, my ears, my feelers are always out, but it’s really hard because all of the natural ones just slip by. All the ones that are just kind of normal, the ones that just have a rightness to them, the best ones just slip by unnoticed.
HEDVIG: They’re too well integrated.
BEN: Like a good assassin, right? You will never suspect the little old lady who you saw every day just buying her groceries.
DANIEL: She’s the one. Like in 2021, I missed PLANT BASED. How could I have done that? I used it all the time. That’s why, because I use it all the time. So, Kelly, what are your tips for noticing new words? Because this is tricky. How do you do it? Or is it happy accidents?
KELLY: That’s a good question. We actually talk about this a bit at the dictionary of… We miss these words. Like, for example, like UNSERIOUS and VIBE, we are not going to be documenting them, and we haven’t. They’re maybe not exactly reflective of how daily usage in dictionaries that have already written for them, but we’re not going to write for them because we feel like even though they just filtered up to us, they’re not actually new and we’re Among the New Words. So, we feel like they maybe don’t fit our criteria even though we also see that they haven’t been robustly documented. So, it’s kind of just this thing of this word is maybe like too every day now to get into our group. And we talked about that of maybe doing not this year, like a retrospective of these everyday words, these words that we’ve missed. I don’t know how to pay closer attention to your linguistic system that’s just turning around.
DANIEL: I’ll have to figure it out. So, your brief really is new words. So, like UNSERIOUS wouldn’t be a good candidate for the new words, but it would be fine for WOTY, Word of the Year, that’d be fine.
KELLY: Would be fine for WOTY, absolutely, and it could have won. I feel like there were a few words in this… There was some debate about UNSERIOUS from the floor with folks saying that it wasn’t new enough to be word of the year because it had been in the English language for like since 17-something or 16-something. Sure, we also look at prominence and stuff like that. But yeah, people were not happy with UNSERIOUS. People were very serious about UNSERIOUS. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, you guys mentioned this as if it’s obvious, but I haven’t seen UNSERIOUS in any high frequency. And Ben is also making the face. So, I think, may be… is it an American media thing?
BEN: Yeah. So, this might be a USA sphere thing that maybe hasn’t quite come across?
HEDVIG: I mean, I know the word UNSERIOUS.
KELLY: I see it the most in memes.
DANIEL: Does it strike a chord if I use the phrase DEEPLY UNSERIOUS?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Does that change anything?
HEDVIG: No, that does not help.
BEN: Not at all. Yeah, it’s so interesting how little semantic like little doodads are going off in my head because I’m like, “Okay.”
DANIEL: I remember DEEPLY UNSERIOUS from the Bush W years.
HEDVIG: “Me trying to stay serious in a very much unserious situation” is like a meme.
DANIEL: Look for DEEPLY UNSERIOUS because that’s a phrase that gets…
KELLY: That, like, brawl. That, like, Alabama boat brawl thing where the guy hit the other guy over the head with the chair?
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: I remember that very, very well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Alabama boat brawl?
KELLY: It was like 25 minutes later, Black Twitter was on fire with memes, and they were like, “We are a deeply unserious people.” [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, that, that. I remember.
KELLY: That made me so happy.
HEDVIG: Is this like silly goose?
DANIEL: No, it’s just somebody who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously on an intellectual level.
KELLY: And/or the making fun of things that we should be taking seriously, but instead we’re just going to meme or be silly about.
HEDVIG: Ohhh.
BEN: Right. So in the case of the Alabama dock brawl, if you were to analyse the constituent components from like a meta place, you’d be like… people doing violence against each other is a bad thing and we should not find that funny, but in that particular moment, we’re like, “But it’s pretty hilarious.”
DANIEL: Okay, now I’m going to lift us out of this particular unit and I’m going to bring us back into a question that I have for Kelly. So, we’ve talked about the nomination process and a little bit about the actual vote where they pile lexicographers, linguists, word lovers into a room and have the big vote. Tell me about the mood in the room, what was it like?
KELLY: It was really great this year because we had the Linguistic Society of America, who we meet with. They did outreach particularly to high schools, to area high schools this year. So, there were a number of teachers who had brought a selection of their students from three or four area high schools outside of Philadelphia. And those individuals came up to the microphone. It was so wonderful because…
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
KELLY: …usually… Yeah, they had a lot to say. They really love YAP and BRAT and BRAIN ROT.
BEN: I imagine CRASH OUT probably featured heavily for them as well.
KELLY: Yeah. And several of them said BRAIN ROT, it’s this bigger thing. It’s like they all had like these very deep ideas about what brain rot is. It was just wonderful to have what I feel like a group of active lexical innovators in the room.
DANIEL: Yep. Very cool. Well, since we’re talking about the Most Fun While It Lasted special category, let’s start there, let’s start at the bottom. Here were the nominees. BRAT, DEMURE, HAWK TUAH, and HOLD SPACE. I still don’t understand what holding space is because of that Wicked interview. I’m confused.
HEDVIG: I think I understand it. What do you mean?
BEN: Wait, do we mean not understanding what the concept means or not understanding how that verbiage was used in that moment?
DANIEL: The second one.
HEDVIG: Did you understand the term GIVE SPACE, Daniel?
DANIEL: Sure. You listen uncritically, you let somebody have the space to voice what they want to voice, and you’re supportive and you’re listening nonjudgmentally. I get it.
HEDVIG: So, I think it’s very much that.
DANIEL: Okay, all right.
HEDVIG: Sort of.
DANIEL: Because when the interviewer said to the actors in Wicked that the queer community was “holding space” for defying gravity, and then the two actors had such a reaction, I thought, “This means something different than what I thought it means.”
HEDVIG: Also, they were on like a press tour and they’re both like… I think there’s a lot of things at play there.
BEN: It’s important, I would say, really quickly to remember as well that… certainly, I’ll say for Ariana Grande, whether you like or dislike or whatever, that is a human being who is very savvy when it comes to presenting themselves and acting and that sort of thing. And I think Ariana in particular knows and is aware of exactly how she’s going to come across and what the sort of impact of certain things is likely to be. So, I would say… I’m going to stop short of accusing her of being ungenuine, but I would say that she’s a very effective communicator with all of the tools in her arsenal, and that she was probably doing something very deliberate when she did that.
DANIEL: Talk about it, Kelly.
KELLY: They also had this other interview, I don’t know if you saw it with them from a few days after that thing went viral. And basically, Ariana and Cynthia were like, “We had no idea what they were talking about.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KELLY: “We had absolutely no idea what HOLDING SPACE meant.” And they were just saying, like, “We just felt…” And this goes to what Ben was saying like, “We felt that it was powerful,” so whatever she said was very meaningful. She was like we felt it even though we didn’t know what she was talking about, which I think is so funny.
DANIEL: Outlier.
HEDVIG: But it’s also like a really good illustration of how new words work. So, when you hear a word and you don’t know exactly what it means, but you have words before it, you have words after it, you know what the topic is, you see the speaker, you can infer a lot of things. I’m reading this book right now. It’s The Great Gatsby, but it gets more and more German as I go along. It’s called progressive translation.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
HEDVIG: It mixes in German words.
DANIEL: I’ve never heard this.
HEDVIG: And at the end, it’s almost all German. It’s really fun.
DANIEL: Fascinating.
HEDVIG: I can recommend it if you’re learning German. Turns out I apparently don’t really like the book, The Great Gatsby, but that’s a separate problem.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: But the translator in the beginning is like, “Look, you’re going to see words that you don’t know, but just resist the urge to stop and look it up. Just like go with the flow, infer what’s going on and you’ll figure it out.” And I think the same is true every day when people say things that we don’t know every word everyone says all the time, but we infer. And they heard HOLDING SPACE and they saw her facial expressions and they heard that the queer community thought something about something they had done, and they were, like, “Okay, well…”
DANIEL: What a great example of: Meaning Is Use, perfect. Okay, well, I’m out of that category if you all are.
BEN: The only thing, what did we say? Sorry, really quickly remind me of the other ones just in case there’s any little bit of meat left on the bone.
HEDVIG: BRAT, DEMURE, HAWK TUAH.
BEN: Oh, I am glad that HAWK TUAH has fallen by the wayside not because of any puritanical like sexual blah, blah, blah. Because…
DANIEL: I’m glad.
KELLY: You’re not against fellatio? Sorry.
BEN: No, I am not. Nor am I against… or like I am very against the demonisation of someone engaging in that behavior, all that sort of stuff.
DANIEL: Calling somebody a cocksucker or something, that just sucks.
BEN: That aspect of that particular word I think was the least interesting thing about it. The reason I’m really glad it’s gone away is because in my job as a high school teacher, things that are perceived by 12- and 13-year-old boys to be edgy, whether that is swastikas or the N-word or the hawk tuah thing, get just absolutely annihilated. So, I heard HAWK TUAH so much last year and I’m really glad that it’s no longer edgy. The meme thing happened, and it became done to death. And I was so grateful because I was so sick of like 12-year-olds thinking they were like the coolest kids ever. And especially for being like, “He won’t know what this means.” And I’m like, “Dude.”
KELLY: Yeah.
DANIEL: I’m on a podcast, flipping heck.
BEN: Please. So yeah, that was my only…
HEDVIG: It’s like the same thing with the… Ben, do you remember that thing where you change your facial structure by putting your tongue…
BEN: MEWING. Yep.
HEDVIG: Mewing, that’s what it’s called. Like, they all thought that was like, super edgy and stuff.
BEN: Yeah. Ugh, it’s such a treadmill.
HEDVIG: And it’s like: Well, I’m glad you’re silent more!
BEN: Here’s a fun one. And Daniel, I know you want to move on, but just let this sit with you. The most recent entry into this little category of like, “Look how cool I am for saying things that most people think are actually really awful,” P Diddy is a very popular name to be thrown around by young men because…
HEDVIG: What are they doing with it?
BEN: Because he is accused of being a ferocious sex predator.
HEDVIG: Oh, I know that.
BEN: And so, by mentioning him, they are sort of… In the same way that teenage boys will talk about Hitler and Nazis and that sort of thing…
HEDVIG: Oh, [SIGHS] okay.
BEN: …like that aspect of it. And so, yeah, I’m just keeping you guys updated on how terrible adolescent humans can be at times.
KELLY: I thought that Diddy was going to be Name of the Year. I really thought it was going to be Diddy. Well, Diddy or Moo Deng.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
KELLY: But it ended up being Ozempic, which is depressing in a different way.
BEN: What a spectrum. Moo Deng, Ozempic, Diddy. Humanity, what is going on?
KELLY: I had to do a little pre-research in case that’s what they chose. Two hours later, we have to have the press release out. And so, we kind of have to do a little ahead… And so, Diddy has been actually interestingly productive for longer than I realized. Like, it’s more than just this moment. They were also… I don’t know if you’ve seen this on ads online where you’ll get a sponsored ad and it’ll maybe be for like a giveaway or something like that, and then all the comments are like, “Nice try, Diddy.”
BEN: Oh, I didn’t know this.
KELLY: There’s something that’s been in the zeitgeist for a long time.
BEN: Wow.
KELLY: Yeah, about him being like a scammer.
HEDVIG: Wait. I don’t understand…
KELLY: …or something.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: No, help me.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I don’t know enough about it.
KELLY: It’s just like this weird thing that people started saying.
HEDVIG: I know that he’s accused of being a sexual predator, but I didn’t know he was scamming people.
KELLY: I don’t think he is. I just think it’s this idea of, like, you’re not trustworthy, like, that’s the name they picked. “Nice try, Diddy. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
BEN: It’s also important to remember that the sort of… I don’t want to speak out of turn here, but rap and hip hop is in its own way a little bit like pro wrestling in that there are narratives that exist for the various players within that field. And there’s like beefs and stuff, and there’s this sort of almost like Roman drama kind of or Greek drama thing that overlays it. And so, I think for a long, long time, Diddy existed as a heel, for lack of a better phrase, within that community. And so, to invoke his name was to sort of… He could either be the boogeyman or he could also be like what’s happening here, the buffoon or the like, “Yeah, good one, buddy. Not this time.”
DANIEL: Okay, let’s go on to the next category. Most Creative Word of the Year. I’m working my way up. THE X THAT I X’D as in “the scream I just scrumpt” or “the gasp I just gusped”. That was the winner. Kelly, what was your reaction to that?
KELLY: Yeah, in past years, we’ve had again these wild card categories. So, we had Snowclone of the Year last year, and this was really the only snowclone that we got nominated this year. So, it really is like, these interesting trends. But I feel like “the scream I scrumpt”, “the gasp I gusped”, those… I have been productive for a little while. People really love them. We got great arguments from the floor to say, like, “Yes, bring back strong verbs.” And: “ablaut, we love ablaut.””
DANIEL: What’s an ablaut? Sorry, go back.
KELLY: Oh, it’s like. It’s the vowel alternation. So, SCREAM to SCRUMPT or like, SING-SANG-SUNG.
DANIEL: Yep, very good.
KELLY: Thank you. That is what it is, right?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
KELLY: Yeah, it was fun. It was really fun to have this category. It will not be fun to do the research to document it, because what do we search for? You know, it’s hard to look up examples.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
KELLY: So, to your listeners who sent us wonderful nominations, I was so happy to receive your list of Words of the Week of the Year, but this… [BEN LAUGHS] Yeah, that was fantastic. And so, if anyone has any of these compounds, I’d love examples.
DANIEL: See, this one wasn’t on it for us because I used it, but I did not think of it as a phrasal template or snowclone. I even did a thing for this on the Speakeasy on ABC Radio Perth, my other gig, but I failed to include it and… got a funny story though. When I shared this with Mark Gibson, the ABC morning radio personality, it was our first show together, and at the time, he fancied himself a bit of a linguistic stickler. So, when I talked about “the scream I just scrumpt”, he actually… like, his eyes got really big and he said, “Is that allowed?”
BEN: To which you were like that, “This thing in your face makes all sorts of noises. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you can do all of them. You can make any of the noises.”
HEDVIG: Daniel, I think you should just lean into it and say yes or no, and just be like, “I decide.” You need to go for it.
DANIEL: I’m the linguist here.
BEN: Czarina.
HEDVIG: If he keeps asking you about it.
DANIEL: Is that allowed? Yes. We have killed God! All is permissible! [BEN LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Or if there’s something that…
BEN: What rituals?
HEDVIG: …you know, doesn’t appeal to you, just say no sometimes for fun.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay. I’ll be a linguistic chaos goblin.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: The irregular past is a fun place. Kelly, I need your help with this one. IN DA CLURB, WE ALL FAM. That was one that didn’t win, but I don’t… this was new to me.
HEDVIG: What?
KELLY: So, Broad City…
BEN: Daniel’s not on TikTok, Hedvig. He’s not exposed.
KELLY: Yeah, I am also not on TikTok. So, this one surprised me because Broad City, I mean, it’s like eight years ago when the scene that is being referenced here came out. And we’ve documented things from Broad City before, actually. The YAAAAS is from Broad City, and we put that in the dictionary.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KELLY: Four A’s if you were wondering.
DANIEL: Thank you.
BEN: So, I was genuinely worried, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
KELLY: Yeah, it was cool. And so, this one, yeah, it’s been very memeable, I guess. We got several nominations for it and just our crowdsourcing. And my favorite definition of all definitions that I’ve been given was for this, and it’s CLURB, which is like CLUB, but CLURB.
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Okay, okay.
HEDVIG: So, Daniel, for the full thing. So, the sound goes, “In da clurb, we’re all fam.” And then, I think she just says, “What?” “In da clurb, we’re all fam.” “What?” And then, she says, “Are you racist? In the club, we’re all fam. In the club, we’re all family.” Right? That’s it?
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Roughly?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: But it’s WE ALL FAM.
HEDVIG: It is. Oh, sorry. I got all of them wrong. I’m sorry.
KELLY: But the second. No, the second time she says it’s great because she’s like, “What?” And she’s like, “In da clurb, we all fam,” Like, the repetition.
BEN: Yeah. The problem was not the words that I used. It was the clarity with which I delivered them. She’s just like, it with more of her chest, that’s the same thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah. This is a good example of what TikTok does, because this is what’s made into what’s called a sound and then you can put different video to that sound. And I was going to ask Kelly if sound had been submitted at all for this kind of meaning.
KELLY: Oh, like the words sound… mean… No. Oh, that’s cool. I’m going to put this on my… This is the first word on my would-be list for this year.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Oh, my god, pole position.
HEDVIG: Because it’s a very particular phenomenon because it works in a very specific way, right? And you can have a sound and the person who’s making a new video content to it doesn’t add any other sound, uses the sound, mouths the thing from the sound, but has subtitles that say something else. Everyone who’s on TikTok knows what I mean and everyone who isn’t is like very confused, but it’s a very productive thing.
BEN: And I would go, I would, yes, and Hedvig and say it doesn’t even need to be a lip-sync-type video. I get a lot of animal content because that’s how I curate my feed. And so, you can have, “In the clurb, we all fam” laid over, like, two puppies interacting in a kind of hilarious way that you would not have thought would fit with this sound. But then, you see it and you’re like, “Whoa, oh that’s such an interesting kick-on effect from what I expected and all that sort of stuff.” So, it is quite semantically generative or semantically, like it can do a lot of heavy lifting.
DANIEL: Okay. Digital Word of the Year. We got BRAIN ROT, the winner. We got AI SLOP, we got COPE, we got TRADWIFE, we got #XIT and #XODUS. My goodness, there was a lot. Did you feel like BRAIN ROT was a deserving winner?
KELLY: I think so. There was like Team Brain Rot in the room. A lot of people were really pushing for it for WOTY overall. So, it does make sense that it won its category.
BEN: There were some cheerleaders.
KELLY: There were some cheerleaders and it’s a live vote, people go on an app and they like do the thing. So, I feel like people really wanted BRAIN ROT to win overall. So yeah, it makes sense. I’m glad that it’s not something like AI SLOP or this other… I’m happier to talk about brain rot.
BEN: Can you tell me why? Because my brain said, “AI slop, surely.” So, I want you to convince me. Convince me why my thought was bad and wrong.
KELLY: Oh, I don’t think it’s wrong.
BEN: No, no.
KELLY: I just spent a good portion of…
BEN: You’re way smarter than me.
[LAUGHTER]
KELLY: I talk about AI a lot and so I’m happy to have personally and professionally happy to have something else and new to learn and discuss and hear from people about…
BEN: Fair enough. You got AI slop fatigue.
KELLY: And it’s… I don’t know, BRAIN ROT is somehow less depressing. I feel like AI slop is like, yep, we’re in it. Like, up to the waist everywhere.
BEN: Perhaps, I am just more comfortable in the churn as I look around and I go, “This seems fitting. This is it.”
HEDVIG: This is what I deserve. Brain rot is more wholesome. I agree with Kelly.
BEN: This is what we as a society have built for us.
DANIEL: This is my life now, mm-hmm. How about the Political Word of the Year? Yeah, we had LIB OUT. We had BURRITO TAXI, BROLIGARCHY. Let’s talk about BURRITO TAXI. Here’s the definition. “Mocking term in arguments about the rising prices of using food delivery apps, ridiculing the idea that it is a sign of inflation.”
HEDVIG: Oh, so this is like Uber Eats and other companies have been going with a loss for a long time in order to try and dominate the market and they’re also paying their workers shit and now they have to turn a profit. So, the prices are going up and then people are thinking that’s inflation, but actually… Is that it?
DANIEL: That’s the cost of the burrito taxi.
BEN: Right.
KELLY: And it’s the cost of the burrito taxi.
BEN: So, we were not seeing clear and accurate prices that entire time. So, when people say, “It’s inflation,” it’s like, no, that’s just what it cost. It’s just a huge faceless corporation has been paying that cost, or at least a portion of it for a really long time.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
HEDVIG: In order to establish a monopoly.
DANIEL: Okay. And then the winner was LUIGI, used in reference to Luigi Mangione charged in the deadly shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. There are variants like LUIGIPILLED, LUIGIFICATION, LUIGI INTENSIFIED, and to get LUIGI’D.
BEN: Can I ask just to like sort of do a bit of a throwback here? This would be an example of something that is deeply unserious, right? Like, a once-removed level assassinating people, bad, but this particular event was very comedically productive.
KELLY: Moments, moments. There were just so many memes. Yeah.
BEN: Oh, wow. Okay. This seems fitting, I think, right? Like, in terms of politics, there have not been many times we sort of… I say we, society broadly, has so full-chestedly cheered the assassination of a person. It was pretty wild.
DANIEL: We of course on Because Language have a very strong policy — I’ll reiterate it — that no one should die for any reason ever, ever, ever. This got more complicated, however, when I realised that this was somebody at the head of a company that had caused people to die by denying them healthcare. And if you think there’s a difference between the two modes of assassination, maybe we could all read some George Lakoff who talks about idealised cognitive models, because some kinds of murder look more murdery than other kinds of murder. Shooting somebody in the street fits most people’s idealised cognitive model of murder. Whereas denying someone healthcare is also murder but cognitively seems less murdery to many people.
HEDVIG: But also, that particular healthcare insurance CEO is one person. There’s a lot of them, and it’s a system and it’s an infrastructure. Like, murdering him was an act by a person who was by all accounts in a lot of pain because of something to do with his back, I think he had chronic pain, and he took it out one person, but he has not fixed America’s healthcare insurance system by killing that person. I think that’s true. Or maybe there’s something we don’t know but he…
KELLY: It’s true. It’s true. This one is interesting. So, LUIGI’D as a verb actually existed before in reference to blue Luigi from Mario. Like, to get Luigi’d or to be Luigi’d, it’s like a demotion. So, if you end up playing that character…
BEN: Oh, interesting.
KELLY: …and you’ve like been Luigi’d or something. But then also, it’s used in this other way, the same way of, like, “Got him.” Like, you’re playing with this handicapped character and yet you win, “Ta-ha, Luigi.” So, that’s exciting. [LAUGHTER] And there were some memes already with Luigi in there. So, I think that’s part of the reason why it became so productive is because people were like, “Oh, this template already exists, here we go.”
BEN: It doesn’t hurt that it’s a deeply stereotypical name.
DANIEL: Oh, people were weird about that.
KELLY: Deeply stereotypical name. Also, it’s following the path that KEN took, when we got KENNUNG in German. So, it’s being interestingly productive in other languages, which I feel like it’s this thing that happened in a really specific American context and yet people are like, “Ooh, new verb.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, I echo… Like, who was it? There was a non-American person who was, oh, it was James Acaster, I think, one of the late-night talk shows that said, like, “I don’t think Americans realise…” like you’re not the best country in the world, but you’re extremely powerful and we all consume your media daily, and he was petitioning that we’d like to vote in your elections, please because [BEN LAUGHS] which is obviously just funny.
BEN: He is a comedian. He was making the jokies.
HEDVIG: Yeah. We consume all of your media, and I complain sometimes on this show that we do too much stuff on American English, but it does influence all the other ones.
BEN: The cultural juggernaut is not to be ignored, unfortunately.
DANIEL: Another one along those lines is SANEWASHING. Now, this one was our Because Language Word of the Year. Listeners and friends voted for it. I never felt very happy about it and in fact I never promoted it because we’ve talked a lot about ableism, and I just thought “I don’t want to spread that.” And I wished that one of our second-place runner ups had done better. You might remember that the second place was a four-way split. There was RAWDOGGING, DEMURE, THIRD SPACES, and AI SLOP. So, I think that we should do something retroactively. I think we should make an executive decision.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Either number one…
BEN: She just did it. Hedvig just did it. She beat you to it. She just said no.
DANIEL: She didn’t even hear me.
BEN: Yeah, she made an executive decision.
DANIEL: Hear me out.
HEDVIG: All right, tell me.
DANIEL: Do we adapt the Word of the Year, the Because Language Word of the Year to -WASHING, the productive form?
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: And then, we say that SANEWASHING is one of those, because there are a lot of washings.
HEDVIG: GREEN WASHING, PINK WASHING. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. SPORTS WASHING. Or do we knock it out entirely and say we’re not promoting that and make four winners. Promote the four second places to the winner.
BEN: No, that’s a cop-out. I’d say -WASHING as a productive suffix.
HEDVIG: I think so too.
DANIEL: -WASHING it is.
HEDVIG: So maybe for listeners we should explain that the reason why Daniel brings this up is that we don’t want to stigmatise being mentally unwell in some way and say that craziness is inherently bad and sane is inherently good. There are plenty of people that are described as sane that do terrible things and have terrible morals and are terrible people. I think in this scenario, it has to do with what people call like the Overton Window or whatever where you have someone who’s making outrageous statement and you’re pretending like they are making non-outrageous statements, that they are saying things that are acceptable, and then by that, sanewashing them. So, I don’t know, people taking seriously Donald Trump invading Greenland is a type of sanewashing.
BEN: I think the better example here with slightly more concerning outcomes is exactly the same thing, but in terms of Palestine and what Donald Trump has been saying about that. So, for the first time ever, as far as I know, a sitting American president has uttered the phrase, “Well, we just need to get Palestinians out of Palestine. That’s the solution. We’ll just get them out of there.” And that is the Overton Window, right? Like, that person saying that thing from that position has now shifted significantly what people believe to be acceptable, possible, a reality, etc., etc. Now, I’m not saying that means that’s going to happen necessarily, but that is exactly what that process is, and it is very dangerous. And I know people always are like, “Oh, your argument doesn’t mean anything when you start talking about the Nazis,” but in this very specific instance, that is exactly how that happens. That is how that happens. That is the rise of fascism. That is burning books. That is exterminating people, is through that process.
HEDVIG: And I think also a lot of people who are very online sometimes, and especially, I think maybe people who live in America who are more used to moving around, don’t fully maybe appreciate the attachment people can have to a place. Think about all these digital nomad types, who are living online all the time anyway and who don’t have any attachment to the proximity or community around them. They would probably happily say, be like, “Oh, okay, I don’t want to live here, I’ll go somewhere else.” And they think that everyone else thinks like that and that therefore this makes sense to say, like, “Oh, if they’re getting hurt by living in that place, why don’t they live somewhere else?” But it’s ignoring and also just protecting what you feel. But in answer to Daniel’s question, I agree with Ben that if anything we should say -WASHING as a productive construction.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think we shouldn’t ignore the fact that people are using SANEWASHING like this and that people voted for it. So, I don’t think we should go with the second-place ones.
DANIEL: Okay, cool, that’s what we’ll do. -WASHING, our Word of the Year is a productive form, -WASHING. Let’s now go to the big one. Nominations aren’t made in advance for the Word of the Year, the big one. What happens?
KELLY: Okay, so what happens is we go through all these other categories, and they get a ballot, and people come up and say, “I think this should be included in this category. Or, this other word needs to be nominated we haven’t considered yet.” And then, we get to the end and folks, we say, “Okay, now we want nominations for overall Word of the Year.” And so, people come up and they nominate a word. Sometimes, they’ll add a new word at that moment that we haven’t considered yet. But a lot of times, it’ll be something like, “I want to nominate BRAIN ROT,” even though we already know it just won for political… Like, for digital or whatever, “I want to nominate BRAIN ROT for Word of the Year overall, because this and that.” So, we have a lot of folks from like the different camps come up.
There was a lot of disappointment over SANEWASHING not doing better in the room, I guess. There were more people excited about RAWDOG than there were about SANEWASHING and it’s just that of like, I personally wish I want to hear from more people. I wish we had more time. I wish we could spend an entire weekend doing it. It’s like, I want those people who were upset about the outcome to have come to the microphone and said how they felt about this term and why it was important and that it’s a productive compound. We didn’t hear any of that discussion even though I know that people feel that way because I read their tweets after. [LAUGHTER] It’s that of like, well, it would have been really great if you had said anything instead of just sat there and been mad, okay.
HEDVIG: Kelly, I’m sorry that you… I don’t mean to… It is…
KELLY: No, no.
HEDVIG: It is a silly thing where we select the Word of the Year. I hope people haven’t been angry at you, because it’s not.
KELLY: Well, no.
DANIEL: It’s supposed to be fun.
KELLY: It should be very fun. It is like a jocular event in which we celebrate lexical productivity, and that’s the end of it. That’s how I feel about, is like, let’s… But a lot of people feel, and I get this, is that we should as a society make a statement with the word that we choose. And then, there’s this other camp, this whole other half of people are like, “No,” that’s… We should be making… If we’re making a statement about anything, it’s about how language works. So, we want to highlight lexification or we want to highlight productivity, which, okay, sure. This year, RAWDOG doesn’t really do either of those things. It doesn’t really make a statement. And it doesn’t necessarily hide… I mean, It’s semantically productive. It’s changing. It’s being used by a new group of users. It’s not as pejorative as it used to be, but I did have a very strange conversation with my father about it.
HEDVIG: Does he remember the older use or…?
KELLY: Yeah, because I guess a lot of people in that generation are like, “Well, I know what it means.” I’m like, “Okay, but it also means these new things.” And I don’t know, I said to my students… Obviously, people are… None of us would be here without rawdogging. It’s something that we all relate to in some way. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Never thought about it like that.
BEN: Kelly, I don’t know if you will find this affirming at all, but I really hate that it won. And what I’m getting from you is that you kind of do as well. And I’m here to say, I get it. Like, of all of the possible choices… It’s not a bad word. It’s not a terrible word. It’s none of those things. It’s not like the shittest thing ever. But when you’ve got these other ones alongside, it’s in the words of Eleanor Shellstrop, it’s basic. It’s such a basic fucking word.
HEDVIG: Wait, wait, wait, Ben.
BEN: Yes?
HEDVIG: Untrue.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: [STERNLY] No.
HEDVIG: It’s not… Also, I think it’s a good example of what you said before, which also, by the way, you didn’t like, which is like, when you take something that is, like, taboo or extreme, and then you bring it into the middle, you say, like, “Oh, that’s a sick outfit,” you don’t mean that someone is like…
BEN: Yeah, no, I know that. I’m not confused about any of that.
HEDVIG: And RAWDOGGING is like taking an edgy term for having sex without protection and then using it for like, doing things without support.
BEN: No, my gripe is not that.
HEDVIG: But like a semantic theme, taking a taboo extreme. That’s fun.
BEN: It’s fine. It’s fine. My gripe, my issue was that, at least to my sort of exposure of this word, is that other than rawdogging flights in particular, there really wasn’t much usage of this. Like, some people stretched it out, but that stuff was from just what I experienced, little drops in the bucket. Rawdogging flights was like a memeable moment. Like, this should have been one of those good while it lasted words at best, in my opinion.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, okay.
BEN: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. You know what? Fuck it. I’m down on RAWDOG. Fuck that word, man. It’s just such a piece of shit word. I’ve got no time for it. Especially when you’ve got YAP, COOKED, CRASH OUT, BRAT, all of which was so much bigger in the zeitgeist, so much bigger. And RAWDOGGING just comes along. [DANIEL LAUGHS] A Stephen Bradbury of fucking Word-of-the-Year words. That’s what it is. A whole bunch of skaters fell down and this fucking word scooted over the line, that’s what happened.
DANIEL: Are we starting to see even more semantic extension? I’m going to give you some ideas here. You tell me if they’re covered by rawdogging. We know about rawdogging flights. The definition that has been given is to undertake without usual protection, preparation or comfort. Now, what about winging it? Like, I’m just going to get out there and rawdog this lecture. Am I using that properly?
KELLY: Yes. Yes.
HEDVIG: Yes, I think so.
DANIEL: Okay, how about doing a lot of something like, “Damn, Daniel you are like rawdogging that pizza, just eating tons of it”? Am I using that correctly? I’m seeing no. Okay, so. But winging it, certainly going out there and just doing a thing, fuck it. That’s rawdogging.
HEDVIG: So, can it be improvised? Because in my high school in Sweden, we borrowed a word from English that is a bit edgy to mean improvised, which I think I’ve mentioned before, which is FREEBASE, [LAUGHTER] which is technically something you do in drug preparation, which I learned later.
BEN: Yeah, amphetamines, yeah.
DANIEL: Sure is.
HEDVIG: I learned to free base meant to wing it, to like, “Oh, I’m just going to freebase this talk I’m giving tomorrow. I’m not going to care anything. I’m just going to stand there.”
DANIEL: Ad lib.
HEDVIG: Ad lib, yes, ad lib is what you’d say…
BEN: That’s really adorable. I really enjoy it.
HEDVIG: It’s very strange and very adorable. And also, I found out some other Swedish people don’t know it. Some people in my hometown do, but it’s like very localised. But is that also… So if I go, yeah, AD LIB and RAWDOG, how much preparation is too much? If I’m giving a lecture, how much preparation can I do while still saying that I’m rawdogging it?
BEN: I would imagine none. That for me, my feeling with rawdogging is that it’s a binary thing. At least how I’ve seen it used, like rawdogging a flight means nothing. Like, you cannot… No books, no music, no headphones, nothing. You’ve just got to sit there like David Puddy from Seinfeld and stare at the seat in front of you for the entire flight, that’s rawdogging. So, if you want to use it for improv, my feeling is it’s literally like you’re walking into that classroom, and you haven’t even made a mental bullet point list. You’re just literally like, “I’m going to look at their faces, and I’m going to say some stuff. And we’re going to see where it goes.”
HEDVIG: Have you ever done that, Ben? You’re a school teacher.
DANIEL: Oh, Ben’s done it. Ben’s done it all the time.
BEN: You’re describing my entire career.
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: He starts thinking about his lesson plan when he puts his hand on the doorknob to walk in!
BEN: Just to be clear to all of the people whom I work with or who employ me, that’s absolutely not true. And I am saying this purely for comedic effect.
DANIEL: [WHISPERS] It’s totally true. He does this.
HEDVIG: No, I don’t believe that for a second because also you know things.
DANIEL: He’s built a lifetime of skills.
HEDVIG: Yes, exactly. He knows things.
KELLY: I’ve heard it in a couple places, like, for… I’ve heard it for several years. I feel like the first time that I encountered rawdogging, it was one of these moments where it was like, “Yep, I’ve done that.” Because it was saying, like, “Oh, I just rawdogged final exams without an Adderall,” or something like that, which I’ve never take… And I was like, “I did all the way from undergrad to PhD without an Adderall.” It’s like, was that what people were doing? It’s like this thing of like… Everyone is out here with undiagnosed ADHD, I feel like those undiagnosed ADHD memes use the term rawdog a lot, like, “I’m just out here rawdogging life,” Like, just trying to, like, “I’ve been doing X, Y, and Z this whole time, and now I have a diagnosis where I understand what’s going on, and I’m finally caring for myself. I am no longer rawdogging life.” I’ve also heard people talk about it for like a family dinner, like going to Thanksgiving dinner stone-cold sober. That’s a rawdog.
DANIEL: I’ve always done that.
BEN: Hedvig, Hedvig, Hedvig. Well, hang on. I can see what you’re about to do, Hedvig. Okay, you need to understand that some people don’t like their family, okay? This is a very important thing for you to be able to process.
HEDVIG: I don’t see the family I don’t like.
BEN: No. Well, this is the thing. Many of us, like, an astounding number of us, have to see family members that we really don’t enjoy. That’s what rawdogging Thanksgiving is about.
DANIEL: That’s the true meaning of rawdogging Thanksgiving. There’s something else about rawdogging, and that is that it seems to take part in a philosophy that I’m going to make my own word of the year: TOXIC STOICISM, where people are really intense about it and they’re like, “No, entertainment is for the weak. You’ve got to have an iron mind and just sit there,” [GRUNTS]. So, TOXIC STOICISM is my Word of the Week.
HEDVIG: I have a really good Word of the Week. And as someone who listens to podcasts in order to do dishes, sometimes people seem to say, like, “Oh, you listen to so much of podcast,” I’m like, “What is the benefit of not doing that? What is it going to give me to not to rawdog doing dishes? Like, what is that giving me?”
DANIEL: Can you sit there and let your mind just reach the state?
BEN: I hate to immediately become Daniel’s fucking antagonist.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. Go, go, go.
BEN: I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: I’m so excited.
BEN: But I’m like that guy now. I’m sorry.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are. You did that fucking bike trip without any podcast, didn’t you?
BEN: Yeah. I want to be clear. I want to be really, really clear, okay? This is not in any way… So first of all, I’m not some fucking Joe Rogan guy. I’m not out here being like, “Everyone needs to do the thing I’m doing because I’m doing it. Therefore, it’s fucking amazing.” So that, A, is not happening.
HEDVIG: That is true. You’re not like that.
BEN: B, I am absolutely not sitting here being like, “My mind is pure for I am not impugning it with the sound waves and the light photons,” or anything like that. I have noticed, I have clocked that as I’m getting older and, in my opinion, kind of more boring as a human being, I want less stimulation in my life, I’m finding. I genuinely am finding constantly having even just lo-fi music on, which is a thing I used to do a lot, like you said Hedvig, like, why would I not listen to lo-fi while I’m doing the dishes? It actually, my experience has been that I have clocked or I’ve come back into myself, sort of… You know how we do things on autopilot, we’re not paying attention to what’s going on and then you go, “Wait, I’m doing a thing right now.” And I look around, I’ve just been like cleaning the house in total silence for like two and a half hours, not because I’m like, “I must not listen to music,” because that’s just what I was doing kind of thing, and so I would never brag about it and I would never say I’m rawdogging things, but I just wanted to quietly say that…
HEDVIG: No, I believe that’s true.
BEN: …you can be non-toxic in your stoicism too, I promise!
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: But also, you might just have not like anxiety.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: You’re not experiencing life wrong. It’s okay.
BEN: Mm, tell me more.
HEDVIG: Because for me, if my mind wanders, it’s going to go, “Everyone hates me. Here’s this embarrassing thing I did,” and it’ll just… So, I wish there was a better way of managing it. And sometimes I do manage it by not doing these things. But sometimes I’m like, I’d like to do the dishes and I’d like to walk around my house and get shit done.
BEN: 100%. And this is what I really, really wanted to make sure to note, which was like, you do you, babe, all the way, every day, 100%. If you are the person who wants to… And Hedvig introduced me to this idea, podcasts to fall asleep to, which genuinely to me, for my lived experience is like a perfect hell that I could not imagine a more awful experience, but if that is your thing, man, fucking yeah, go for it 100%.
DANIEL: Can I just also say, from the perspective of an old guy, give yourself 20 years and you will not give a shit about all your embarrassing old memories, you will have worn those things to the bone. They will be…
BEN: Maybe, Daniel, that is only something that applies to us white old guys. So, we have the comfort and the privilege to be like, “Whatever, I do what I want.”
DANIEL: Well, I used to… Okay, so I used to have that dream where I’m on stage and I don’t know the show and everyone’s staring at me, do you know the one?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: And then one night when I’d had this dream — it was my recurring dream…
HEDVIG: I don’t have that one.
DANIEL: It’s something that I guess actors have. And I said to myself — there I was on stage, audience there — and I said, in my dream, “This is not my fault. Were there no rehearsals? Did nobody know that I couldn’t do this? This is bullshit.” And I never had that dream again! I worked all the way through it, and I gained enough confidence, I guess, to be able to put that one to bed, so to speak.
BEN: Dream therapy. There you go, man.
DANIEL: Let’s finish up. Kelly, what were your thoughts finally on Word of the Year? Were you happy with RAWDOG? No. Were you happy with the process? What’s your reflection?
KELLY: Yeah, I’m happy with RAWDOG. I felt like I was on Team Rawdog, and I encouraged others to be as well, and it was successful. I don’t actually get to vote.
DANIEL: Oh, I didn’t know that.
HEDVIG: But I do get to talk to my friends.
KELLY: Well, I’m like actually up there.
BEN: The Czar doesn’t get to vote.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay.
KELLY: The Czar does not get to vote. I only count. All I do is count.
DANIEL: Okay, all right.
KELLY: That’s what I do. I’m the Data Czar. No, no, it’s okay. Because if I had chosen, it would have been BAD BUILT BLEACH BLONDE BUTCH BODY, that’s what I would have picked. So, I’m just so glad that it made it onto our list that we get to discuss the most wonderful alliteration of our generation.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Wait, I don’t think I know this one.
DANIEL: It’s poetry.
KELLY: It’s also very American. It’s very American, very politics. It was Jasmine Crockett, Texas, I believe, talking to Marjorie Taylor Greene, and they were BAD BUILT BLEACH BLONDE…
HEDVIG: BLEACH BLONDE.
KELLY: …BUTCH BODY.
HEDVIG: BUTCH BODY.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Good alliteration.
KELLY: Which, yeah, I guess is in our Political Word of the Year. BAD BUILT… Yeah, BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY. BLEACH BLONDE is first, sorry. BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: There we go. I see now.
KELLY: Order matters, I guess. But anyway, because I guess somebody said, like, “Oh, you can’t insult another member of Congress’s character.” And Marjorie Taylor Greene said something nasty before that. And then, she came back and she said, “So if I said so and so has like a bleach blonde bad built butch body, that’s not insulting her character, right?” And she was like, “I don’t know.”
BEN: The spirit of the law and the letter of the law. So different.
KELLY: It immediately became a song. It was like… I don’t know. This is where we would be if I chose. Do you know what I mean?
DANIEL: Yes, I do.
KELLY: It’s a good thing that I don’t.
DANIEL: Thank you. And I never want to hear that sequence of words ever again.
KELLY: You’re very welcome.
DANIEL: So, we are going to have on the show notes for this episode, a link to the American Dialect Society Word of the Year nomination page, which I guess, as you’re telling us, is up now and ready for business. Nominate now. Nominate often. All right, thank you for talking to us. I think I’m putting the Word of the Year season to bed. It’s now time for Related or Not.
BEN: Ooh, yeah.
DANIEL: Our theme this time comes from Tiago, and Tiago says, “Hi, Daniel, Hedvig, Ben. Love the show. I’m a linguist on my masters, and I find that listening to you guys early in the morning is a great way to get in the mood for a nice day of linguisting.”
BEN: There we go. We get people in the mood, guys.
DANIEL: This is theme that Tiago sent us, and I guarantee you are not ready for this level of talent.
TIAGO: [SINGING] If the roots of two different words share similar sounds and pertain to neighboring semantic feels, you will try to find out just how their history shows because language through the years evolving roads. So, are the words related or not converging somewhere in the far distant past? Do you think they share a common ancestry etymologically? So, are the words related or not? Phonemes eroded into separate forms. It’s a deduction game to win or rather fail at miserably. So, are the words related or not converging somewhere in the far distant past? Do you think they share a common ancestry etymologically?
HEDVIG: Well done. Thank you, Tiago, so much.
BEN: Tiago, your voice is so deep that I genuinely thought you were Mongolian throat singing for good portions of that song.
HEDVIG: I thought so too, especially the end.
DANIEL: Well, I asked Tiago about this because what I heard and if you go back and listen, you will actually hear it’s very deep. There’s a very deep note, but sometimes you can’t tell… Is he singing two notes, one octave above the other?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. Is he doing polyphonic?
DANIEL: And the answer is yes, he’s doing harmonics. That’s what’s happening. So, I asked about it and he says yes.
HEDVIG: That’s really awesome. Awesome.
DANIEL: That was the effect. He’s doing something called Kargyraa throat singing, which allows you to set up harmonics.
BEN: Ah, I can’t believe it. I thought for sure that was not what was happening and it’s actually what was happening. That’s wild.
DANIEL: He says “It is a learnable technique, not a natural feature of my vocal cords. Also fun, by the way, that one learns overtones by becoming very mindful of the transition from front vowels like /i/ to back vowels like /u/, and the effects of roundedness and tongue position in the oral cavity, by which I mean spending hours slowly and continuously moving from /i/ to /u/ back and forth in single breaths.” Ain’t that something?
BEN: That’s crazy. That’s so cool.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool.
DANIEL: Pretty incredible.
HEDVIG: Hey, can I tell you something related? I promise I’ll be as quick as I can.
DANIEL: Or not.
HEDVIG: I have been taking vocal coach lessons.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: And I have a very nice woman who’s teaching me how to sing properly, and she’s teaching me all these things. I know some phonetics. I know what a high vowel is and what a back vowel is, but the weird things are that when you sing, you need to do things differently because you need to be able to independently control the back of your throat and the height of your glottis and the front of your mouth separately. And you need to do weird stuff. So, when you need to produce a high note and a high vowel, you can’t do the same thing as when you’re speaking. You need to do other shit. And it’s so confusing, and it’s really hard. And I’m relearning phonetics, and it’s so weird.
BEN: Aah.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s quite enjoyable, but it’s also really… Currently, I’m in the phase of overthinking. So now I’m like, now my singing is currently worse than it used to be.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Well, you’ve got to correct all of the bad knowledge, right?
DANIEL: I think it’s a local minimum.
HEDVIG: Yes, because I’m like… And then now, this thing and then I get all in my head, and then I produce bad things. But she’s like, “No, no, you’re doing the right thing. It currently sounds bad, but we’ll correct that,” but…
DANIEL: Very cool. Good on you. That’s good for your lecturing voice as well. Okay, this one was inspired by nao on our Bluesky, we are becauselanguage.com on Bluesky because we are verified. Now, the reason I’m thinking about this one… the words are GOBLIN and GREMLIN. And the reason I’m thinking about this is that Hedvig used the term CHAOS GOBLIN back in episode 100, Spicy Mailbag. And we’ve been putting out videos and stickers about our Linguistic Chaos Goblins made by Doug and Trudy of Oglaf. We love them. But now the AV club — you know the AV club? — They’ve intruded on our turf because they did a story about the ADS Word of the Year. Here’s the headline. “American Dialect Society once again chooses chaos, names RAWDOG 2024 Word of the Year.” And then here’s the subtitle. “The Linguistic Chaos Gremlins have chosen to rawdog the English language.” So, we’ve got LINGUISTIC CHAOS GOBLINS, but they’ve gone with CHAOS GREMLINS. And I’m not happy about it! But anyway, so it got me thinking. GOBLIN and GREMLIN, related or not?
BEN: I’m coming in hard straight away, had a gut feel going with it. Not related.
DANIEL: Not related. Okay.
BEN: Not related.
DANIEL: Okay. Do we all feel the same way? Because that’s what I said, too.
KELLY: Yeah.
BEN: Can someone justify it for me? I feel like this thing has happened where my lizard brain has identified a bunch of component pieces and has given me an intuitive feeling, but I don’t actually know what the component pieces are.
DANIEL: Hedvig, you’re thinking pretty hard over there.
BEN: She’s got the chin stroke going. She’s like a guy at the back of a metal concert.
HEDVIG: G is pretty different from G-R.
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: But R’s are funky because they can jump over vowels.
BEN: Okay, okay, hold on. Explain that one for the people at home.
HEDVIG: Isn’t that what happened with BIRD?
DANIEL: Yes, it is. BIRD and BRID. A BIRD used to be a BRID. A HORSE used to be a HROS.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KELLY: A HROS [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Because you can kind of make an R at the same time as you make a vowel. You can do, it’s like R coloring your vowels. And if you first have it before and you start R coloring the vowel after, you stop producing the R before, and then you start producing the R after. So, through time, R’s can like skip over vowels.
DANIEL: They twiddle. So, THIRTEEN used to be THRITEEN. Which makes sense, right? Three-teen?
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: And what’s the name of the cheese that starts with M and ends with -PONE?
BEN: Mascarpone. [maɹskəpoʊni]
DANIEL: Mascarpone. [maɹskəpoʊni] But if you want to blow your mind, go to the store, look at the label. You know what it says? It doesn’t say mascarpone [maɹskəpoʊni].
BEN: It says mrascapone?
DANIEL: Mass-car-pony.
BEN: Oh.
DANIEL: Yeah. Welcome to the world you’ve been living in. Okay, so yeah. G-R, G-O.
HEDVIG: So, then the question is, was there ever a GURMLIN?
DANIEL: Mm.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: But this might be… I also… My instinct said no. GOBLIN: gobble, you gobble down something or you make the sound that turkeys make.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: GREMLIN: So, in Germanic languages, you get gr stuff for digging I think in a lot of things. So, gremlins maybe dig. I say they’re not related, but I’m not sure why.
DANIEL: We all say they’re not related. So, what about the -LIN? Is the -LIN the same -LIN? We’re going to take it down a level, I thought yes.
KELLY: I think so. I think the -LIN part is the same because I feel like GREMLIN to me sounds much newer.
DANIEL: How new?
KELLY: I don’t know. But I feel like I always see it referencing or used to like machines.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
KELLY: Like a bug.
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
KELLY: Like a bug in the program is like a gremlin in the machine or whatever. And so, I think about that, which makes it feel newer than like a goblin, which to me, I’m like, “Folklore, right?” Like, I don’t. But the -LIN part is like, is it one who gobbles or one who grems?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, Ben, lin. Same -LIN or different -LIN?
BEN: I’m actually going to go with no, just because we need some differentiation in these answers. And I’m going to go with no, because I reckon there was a thing of like, it’s been an instance where two quite different ideas are semantically very close and then their closeness of word morphed over time to be closer to each other. Does that make sense?
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Because the meanings were similar, the words got morphed towards each other a bit.
DANIEL: They grew. They grew together.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, good. Hedvig. Same idea or no?
HEDVIG: Same -LIN. Some sort of diminutive, adjunctive thing.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Like what Kelly said.
DANIEL: Okay, here we go. We were all correct in that GOBLIN and GREMLIN are not related. Goblin, we don’t really know where it comes from. Possibly ancient Greek, kobalos, which means rogue. But, Ben…
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: …you win in that the two words did grow together, and those two -LINs are the same -LIN. So, you lose on that one. But the real winner here is Kelly, who picked the timing because GREMLIN has only existed since the 1920s. It’s RAF slang for a little evil spirit that goes around breaking machines. Kelly, you…
BEN: No way
DANIEL: …are the champ.
HEDVIG: Really?
DANIEL: What’s the GRIM? Nobody knows. Possibly Old English, GREMMAN, to anger or to vex. But Oxford is a little bit meh on all of those, but the answer is not related, but they are the same -LIN. Thanks nao, for that one.
BEN: Well, clearly, Kelly…
KELLY: You know I forgot about HOBGOBLIN.
BEN: Oh, yeah?
DANIEL: Yes.
KELLY: Like the HOB- part of goblin, I forgot about that.
DANIEL: The HOB- is a person. That’s a person’s name. Etymonline tells us that Hob is actually a variant of the name Rob or Robin Goodfellow. But anyway, let’s go on to the next one. I was having a text chat with my mom, and she wrote, “Love you,” and I wrote “Love you to,” T-O accidentally with one O, and I left it. So, it made me think, too, T-O-O, like also, is it related to T-O, or is it related to the number…
HEDVIG: TO dance.
DANIEL: …two or neither?
BEN: Okay. Oh, this is a tricky one.
DANIEL: T-O-O. Is it related to TO, T-O? Or is it related to the number 2? Or neither. I thought neither. That’s my vote.
BEN: So, you say all three are unrelated.
DANIEL: That’s what I think. Hedvig, what’s TO like in Swedish, the T-O? Do you have a cognate word?
HEDVIG: So, a sentence like, “That is too much sugar”?
DANIEL: No, I mean, like, “I’m going to town.”
HEDVIG: Oh — TILL. ÅT. It’s like a spatial preposition depending on which one…
DANIEL: Till. Is that related to TILL? Like UNTIL?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, cool. Just wondering.
HEDVIG: But it’s not a one-to-one. It’s a one-to-many. So, Ste is going through this, poor man. And then too much: för mycket, like four. And then too is för. I think that the English TOO as in TOO much is related to… Oh, wait, so there’s TOO much and then there’s I love you TOO. They’re different.
DANIEL: We’re treating those as the same.
BEN: Oh, okay. So also, and…
HEDVIG: So TOO much, love you TOO, TO dance, TO the city and TWO people.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. All right.
DANIEL: So which one is TOO as in, “I love you too.” Is that related to TWO? Think about it.
HEDVIG: It’s related to number two, surely.
DANIEL: If I’ve got something and you have something TOO, there are TWO things.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. It’s related to number two.
BEN: Nah, nah.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig says the number two. Ben and Kelly both say no. What’s your reasoning?
BEN: Kelly first.
KELLY: Okay. I feel like somewhere in my brain, there’s like the history of the number TWO rattling around. I can’t grab it, but it feels like it’s not the same.
DANIEL: Okay, okay.
BEN: That’s 100% where I was going with that as well. I just was thinking about the fact that all of the Indo-European words that sound like two that we know are related because they’re close to two. Don’t sound like two at all but do. Like, we can tell that they’re related but dho in Hindi is not like… People would not be… Yeah, so that’s why I’m going with not related to the number thing, I feel like that just happened to be how English took that number, and instead of using a D or whatever, it just ended up as a T because of that particular type of shift. And so almost a little bit like my previous answer, it’s just like it ended up morphing in that direction, but not because it’s related, but because of random hapstance.
HEDVIG: Okay, but I don’t understand why don’t you think that the number two could in English be extended to the meaning of “I love you too”?
BEN: I think because… I don’t know because for me, this idea of ALSO or AS WELL is really throwing a spanner in my works.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Because it doesn’t feel like the second number of a thing semantically is a very good stand-in for like ALSO. For instance, in the instance of “I love you too,” it kind of makes sense, but like, “I went to the city too.” That doesn’t make any sense. Like, I went to the city.
HEDVIG: No, but that one is not in the same play. We’re only thinking about the “I love you too” and number two.
KELLY: But you said think of them as the same thing, right? So, you’re saying too much and also… Because I think about like “and I you,” like an older construction of like, “I love you,” “And I you,” or something, [AGREEMENT SOUNDS] it makes me feel like maybe that’s part of where this two, you, T-U for U and TWO, and our history of borrowing from French, that’s part of the reason why I feel like maybe they’re not the same because the number two is coming from this different evolutionary track than maybe the tu-vous-you-blah-blah-blah version of that. But then, I think, to me, I’m getting tripped up on if ALSO and AS WELL, like, are the TOO much… The TOO much and the “I love you TOO” are the same T-O-Os, but I will conflate them for this moment and then think about them.
HEDVIG: But those are the two we’re conflating. We’re not conflating “I love to dance.”
KELLY: That’s the one that’s making me crazy.
BEN: But no, Daniel did ask about that TOO as well. He said all three.
HEDVIG: He said. He said all three, but I thought he only said that TOO much and I love you TOO are to be treated the same.
DANIEL: Let’s treat them the same for this one. But let’s… Okay, I’ll make that more clear. Let’s treat going TO town and going TO dance, let’s treat those as the same as well.
BEN: Well, let’s make this easy for the listeners. We’re just talking about spelling here. T-O, T-O-O and T-W-O. Those are the three words. And we’re asking, are they related to each other?
DANIEL: There we go. It’s not that simple, but okay, let’s treat it like it’s simple because it kind of is.
BEN: As in, that’s the question you’re asking us, Daniel.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Right. You want us to treat all of the words that are spelt T-O-O as the same. All of the words that are spelled…
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Okay, good. I will. But the listeners might not have understood that. And I am staying with my original answer, which is none of the fucking three are related! So, there you go, there’s a simple answer, Buster.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I think, actually, Ben and Kelly might be right, but I think I’m going to hold the banner for some sort of distinction.
BEN: Good on you. Stand by it.
HEDVIG: …because I do like the idea of I love you, I love you TOO, like number TWO, is cute.
BEN: [LAUGHS] It is cute.
KELLY: I am saying. I do not think T-O-O and T-W-O are related, but I’m not sure about the other direction.
BEN: Oh, we’ve got three answers. This is fun.
KELLY: The single O to the double O. That one, I don’t…
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, here’s the answer. T-O-O, like “I love you TOO” is related to TO the preposition, not the number TWO.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: So, Kelly was right.
BEN: Nicely done.
KELLY: Wasn’t sure.
DANIEL: Very good. Here’s the path. The path is the word, to, T-O, meant something like “an extent”. So, if you go TO town, you go to that extent, and then you stop. Just like with Swedish, TILL, I’m going until town, and I’m not going any further.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: After that.
BEN: Okay, okay. Yep, I get that.
DANIEL: And we see this in expressions like you PULL THE DOOR TO, which means you pull the door to an extent, right? Okay, at the same time, people were using to, T-O, to mean, “Wow, that is an extent that I don’t want. Now, I have TOO many.” That’s the extent and it was unwanted. Now, for I love you TOO, that TOO happened because you start out with, I have TOO much. I have additional from what I need. So, the additional meaning started moving to the end of the sentence like, “I’m tired. And in addition, I’m hungry.” “I’m hungry. additionally.” “I’m hungry too.” So that’s how I love you TOO is related TOO much. And finally, here’s another interesting aspect. If you look at people spelling things, it was T-O until about the 1500s. People didn’t make it T-O-O until mid-1500s at the earliest.
HEDVIG: But there’s no negator content at all.
DANIEL: I have TOO much.
HEDVIG: That too much is…
DANIEL: It’s just got a negative valence a little bit.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it does, which is funky.
DANIEL: Yeah, it is, yeah. Yeah.
BEN: So, are we saying then that those two words were simply senses of the same word and then over time, because they were being used differently, someone was like, “Well, we’ve got to sort this out.”
DANIEL: Yes, that is correct. People just sort of slapped on the extra O and that’s going to do it.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, there we go. That’s our Related or Not. Thanks to nao and thanks once again to Tiago for our Related or Not jingle. We love what people are sending us. If you would like to create a jingle, you can do that by sending it to hello@becauselanguage.com. And, Kelly, you win the game. Congratulations.
BEN: Definitely.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: All hail the Czar. I don’t know what vestments and regalia you are afforded in your position, but I must believe that whether it be a stole or a scepter or a crown, heavy be the shoulders or the hands or the head that wear it. It’s quite the power.
DANIEL: Let’s hear a comment from Paula. This one is… Ben, this one’s kind of for you.
BEN: Oh, no, I fucked up, didn’t I?
DANIEL: Nah, you’re great.
BEN: Okay.
PAULA: Hi, my name’s Paula. I’m a listener from Newcastle, UK. I was just listening to the Words of the Week of the Year episode, and I was really excited to hear Ben speaking about the idea of third spaces. I find the idea fascinating, and I’ll talk to anyone who will listen about how a lack of these spaces is so harmful to us. Specifically, I talk a lot about how, for me, language conversation groups have become a third space. For example, I have a Spanish conversation group here in Newcastle and I’ve been going there for 10 years. Every Wednesday, come rain or shine, same time, same place we meet. And it’s the two hours a week when I am completely present. I’m not worrying about anything or thinking about my to-do list. It’s been a constant for me through the best and worst times of my life.
I love that we go there very deliberately to converse with each other. We’re not looking at our phones or watching sport on a big screen TV. We very deliberately are there to converse with each other. It’s where I understood my first joke in Spanish. It’s where I’ve made friendships with all manner of interesting people who I would never have met otherwise. It’s something I’m very grateful to have in my life. And I wish more people knew about the concept of third places and understood the importance of them. Thanks.
DANIEL: Thank you, Paula. Ben, what do you reckon?
BEN: I actually found that quite affecting. I would normally drop in a joke or go for a gag here, but I think that would cheapen what was very clearly something that was really special and important to Paula. So, I just want to leave that there. I think she, much better than I did, summed up exactly why those places can be so important and so special, and I’m just so heartened to hear that she has that experience. That was really cool. So, thank you so much, Paula. I was so sure someone was calling in to be like, “Oh, this is what Ben got wrong on every level about that stuff.” So, I was really happy to hear that. That was such a lovely and special thing for her.
DANIEL: So, find your third space, people.
BEN: Ah, so good.
DANIEL: It’s got so many benefits. Our last comment. We’ve got so many things that people have given us, but I’m going to have to just choose one thing, and I’m going to choose this one from Pontus, affectionately known around here as Moon Moon. Here’s his comment.
PONTUS: Hey, guys. I just finished the episode of Word of the Week of the Year, and Ben said something in the end where he said, like, “Everybody likes Daniel.” But I just have to say that of all the hosts, I love all three of the hosts, but Ben is my favourite. Just to make that official. I think that’s important.
BEN: I can’t believe… you fucking bastard! You let me go earlier in this show, and say the same shit again, and you had that fucking shit in your back pocket!
DANIEL: [SINGS] You are the favourite. You are the favourite.
BEN: You are a mastermind, my guy. That was… wow. You set me up for that one.
DANIEL: And, uh, people like Hedvig too.
HEDVIG: That is so nice.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: I have gone bright red. A person I don’t know from Sweden saying that I am the favourite on the show has made me blush. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s very nice.
DANIEL: I actually threw that in because I knew you would hate it.
BEN: It’s very uncomfortable, but I’m trying to be okay with affection or being like…
DANIEL: Try to hold space.
HEDVIG: Try to bring forth your inner American.
BEN: [LAUGH] I just love that…
HEDVIG: I just think they’re better at this. They’re better at accepting compliments.
BEN: I just love that you managed to get the poor yanks to catch a stray from me getting a compliment, it’s just brutal.
HEDVIG: That’s a bad thing. I usually kind of like… It’s kind of a bit of a toxic trait to not be able to take compliments.
BEN: Yes, I am toxic. It’s true.
DANIEL: We don’t want that. Well, you know who I’m so grateful to? Dr Kelly Wright for being our special guest. Kelly, thank you so much for coming and talking us through this. It’s always a lot of fun to have you on the show.
KELLY: Thanks for having me back. I really like talking to y’all.
BEN: Ah, honorary co-host for sure, especially…
KELLY: Hedvig’s my favorite.
HEDVIG: Wait, what did she say? I couldn’t hear it.
KELLY: That you’re my favorite.
HEDVIG: Oh, now we’re all someone’s favourite.
DANIEL: Everybody’s somebody’s favourite.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Thanks to everybody who gave us questions and comments for the show. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words and you patrons who keep the show going. We’ll see you real soon.
HEDVIG: If you like the show, there are a number of things you can do to support us. We keep doing this because we enjoy it, but we are more inclined to do it more when we get positive feedback like when someone writes in a little voice message and says that someone is their favourite. [BEN LAUGHS] Anyway, you can follow us in all the regular social media spaces. We’re mainly using Bluesky. Recently, I’ve also started using Bluesky. Daniel has not given me access yet to the Bluesky Because Language account, but maybe someday he will.
DANIEL: I will. It’s all new.
BEN: He knows exactly what he’s doing.
DANIEL: Slow walking that.
HEDVIG: We are becauselangpod in all of those spaces. So, like Facebook, X, Twitter, Bluesky, etc., And you can also do like Pontus and Paula did and send us a little voice message on SpeakPipe on our website. Our website is becauselanguage.com and we can also receive just regular old emails. You can send them to hello@becauselanguage.com. A great way that I learn about new podcast and that you can share the good word is to tell a friend about us in person and say, “I really like this show. It’s helpful to me.” I think perhaps in particular like Tiago who if you’re studying linguistics and you want to keep up to date for certain things or you just want to have some nice linguistics yapping while you do your dishes, then that can be a great thing. So, if you have a friend who’s doing linguistics, you can tell them about us.
BEN: And one other really awesome thing you can do is you can become a patron and like yep, sure, we get a little bit of money if you do that. Not necessarily though because you can become a non-paying patron as well which is like another cool thing you could do. But if you do become a paid patron, sure, we get a little bit of money, that’s really cool. But one of the really cool things that you get to do is come and hang out with all the other patrons on the Discord. And that place is great. It’s really lovely.
And I know a lot of our patrons are probably listening to this and being like, “Ben Ainslie, why do you say those things when you spend so little time with us on the Discord?” But I just find myself a lot less online than I used to be. But I just also noticed that one of the sub channels of the Discord is a crafting section. And I have so many photos of the terrible shirts I’ve been trying to make that I am now going to be posting in that subsection. So, if you would like to see my abysmal attempts at sewing and my actually not too bad attempts at woodworking, please become a patron, join the Discord, and you can hang out with me, and then also other really cool people.
DANIEL: There we go. Big shoutout to our patrons of the Supporter Level. This time we are doing another creative way of ordering the names. Not alphabetically, not in order of joining patrons. This time we’re ordering by name frequency. The frequency of your name, if you were a baby being born in the year 2023, according to Social Security Data in the U.S.
BEN: This is going to be interesting.
DANIEL: Sometimes, your name won’t appear, but I’ll do my best. So, first is Jack. Next is J0HNTR0Y. I had to combine the counts for John and Troy which is why you came so high. Daniel is here — amazingly popular. Just a great, great name. A surprise, next, Elías or Elias.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
HEDVIG: Hmm.
DANIEL: Ariaflame, your name isn’t in the database, but Aria is, so I decided to count it. Next, Amir, and then Canny Archer. Did you know that Archer is actually a super-duper popular baby name?
BEN: I did not know that. No.
DANIEL: I guess Hunter was like too vague. Anyway! Next, Luis, Diego, Kevin, Amy, Molly, Rach, Alyssa, Joanna, Laura, Helen, Fiona. Fiona doubled her membership and became a supporter. That was awesome. Love it when people do that. Felicity, and then we’ve got the Andys, Andy B, Andy from Logophilius, Meredith, sæ̃m, Keith, Kelly, you are at this point in our list for reference. Now, we’ve got the Chrises. There’s Chris L, Chris W. Ben, you’re appearing at this point in the list.
BEN: Oh, man, that’s wild. I thought you weren’t counting me. I would have thought my name would have come way before this.
DANIEL: I would have thought so too.
HEDVIG: Yeah, above Fiona.
DANIEL: Benjamin does, but Ben does not.
BEN: Oh, I see. Okay.
DANIEL: I had to get specific for you. Let’s see Tony, Whitney, Ignacio, Aldo, Rene exists with male and female variants, so I combined them. Larry. There’s no Termy, but Terry, close enough. Termy, you’re here. Ayesha, Steele, you’re high up in the list because also a girl name. Imagine a girl named Steele. Watch out.
BEN: Pretty cool.
DANIEL: Steele. Pretty cool. PharaohKatt. Okay, I was actually surprised by this, but did you know that Pharaoh is actually kind of a popular name?
BEN: I did not.
DANIEL: I thought that Katt was going to be the popular half of this, but Pharaoh, both A-R-A-O-H and A-R-O-A-H. So, there’s a bit of a AOH-OAH thing going on there for Pharaoh. Watch out for that. Wolfdog. Wolf is a very popular name. Colleen, Nigel, Kathy, Tadhg, quite a few Tadhgs. LordMortis, I went with Lord, which had a few counts, and then Morticia, which also had a few. Did you know that there’s some babies walking around with the name Morticia?
BEN: I actually kind of like that.
HEDVIG: That makes perfect sense. What about Mort?
BEN: Yeah, Morty.
DANIEL: There was no Mort. There was no Mort. There were Mortimers, there were Mortons, but there was no Mort. Kristofer with a K. Manú. O Tim, I didn’t have O Tim, but there was Timo, T-I-M-O, so I went with that.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Rodger, Margareth, Nikoli, Linguistic C̷̛̤̰̳͉̺͕̋̚̚͠h̸͈̪̤͇̥͛͂a̶̡̢̛͕̰͈͗͋̐̚o̷̟̹͈̞̔̊͆͑͒̃s̵̍̒̊̈́̚̚ͅ, wasn’t a name but I was looking for names with the same letters as CHAOS and Charlie Rose has the same letters as CHAOS in the same order. We have a new supporter, somebody named Mignon, who’s that? Mignon isn’t in the database because fewer than five people had it, but Mig, M-I-G, there was a name, Almighty. There are some babies walking around with the names Almighty. Well, they’re not walking around yet, but pretty soon. gramaryen — Gram — you’re on the list. Hedvig, best I can do is Hedy, H-E-D-Y. You’re here on the list for reference.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: Yep. No Hedvig. And no Hedwig either.
BEN: Out of interest, Daniel, this list, where is it from? Because I’m assuming there’s a lot of Hedvigs in Sweden, for example.
HEDVIG: No, this is US 2023 baby names.
BEN: Oh, US, US, sorry.
DANIEL: Not from the census. From the Social Security database, publicly available.
KELLY: Which is why there are no Bens.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: People named Benjamin.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. That’s right. Nasrin, Stan, Sonic Snejhog. Okay, this one wasn’t in the database at all, but Sneijder with a J, I went with that.
BEN: I would have thought Sonic might have shown up, to be honest…
DANIEL: None, none.
BEN: Given its popularity in video games and all that sort of stuff.
DANIEL: And Lyssa. Our latest patrons at the Listener level. LingAnth, with a yearly membership. Camden with a yearly membership. Daryl, Eden, Tyler, Adam, and Chris H. At the Friend level, Aini, coming back with a yearly membership.
HEDVIG: That’s my mom!
DANIEL: That’s your mom.
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s very sweet.
HEDVIG: I have to remember not to say things that she would find embarrassing or bad, but I don’t think I do.
DANIEL: Hi, mom.
BEN: Too late!
DANIEL: Also, hi to my mom. And Robert with a yearly membership. And new free patrons, Jess, PATRICK, platypus, Amanda, Darlene, Leli, Michelle, Carmen, Zara, Pink Doberman, Wu Chen, Alejo, Jo, Nrobnas — I like to say that because it sounds like I’m saying an evil incantation backwards. I wonder what I just said. Ooh, let’s find out. [BACKWARDS] Sanborn. — Melina, Claire, Cáca, Zoryana, One, Yedda. Thanks to all of our fantastic patrons. Kelly, I’m giving this to you. You’ve got the last little bit.
KELLY: Yeah. Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
BEN: Okay, really quickly, Alyssa was the least popular or the most…?
HEDVIG: Yeah, that was weird.
BEN: What the fuck?
DANIEL: Alyssa was up there, but Lyssa was not.
BEN: Oh, Lyss… Sorry. Okay.
DANIEL: Did I say…? I’ll check that in the edit.
HEDVIG: No, no, you said Lyssa. You did. It’s just… I think maybe Ben and I were thinking you would combine Alyssa and Lissa for her count, but why would you? Because her name is not Alyssa.
DANIEL: I decided I was tired by that point in the list.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]